The Lustre Of The Old

“This is a Greek coin, Drachma, keep it safe. Next, you have Poland’s Zloty, Mexico’s Peseta, and Peru’s Sol.” That was Nemo – the Satyajit Ray’s adaptation of the name from Jules Verne’s Captain Nemo of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea in his last film Agantuk (The Stranger) – while gifting his grand-nephew a few foreign coins he had collected during his pursuit of knowing tribal civilisations. “Even my friend’s father collects coins. I know what they are called. Numismatists,” says the excited little boy. Coins, one of the more durable artefacts invented by humanity, come to us as symbols of lost memory, or of exotic worlds. For Nemo, the protagonist of the film and an anthropologist by the character, it was more an avocation — little tokens that he picked from his journey across the globe, gathering them along...